The Missouri Department of Natural Resources recently entered into a contract with Texas County commissioners and the county surveyor to help restore land survey monuments.
Texas County Surveyor Louie Carmack and the commission are under contract to restore land corner monuments of the U.S. Public Land Survey System with the department’s land survey program in Rolla that is responsible for maintaining the land survey system in Missouri.
This system serves as the foundation for all land titles in the state and provides the framework for establishing property boundaries and land boundary corners.
“These cooperative agreements with county governments allow the division to accomplish the goal of maintaining our state’s survey monuments while using the expertise of the county surveyors in this important endeavor,” said Joe Gillman, state geologist and division of geology and land survey director. “This fiscal year, 379 monuments will be restored.”
The Land Survey Program was created in 1969 when the Missouri General Assembly realized that more than 90 percent of the original survey markers in the state had been destroyed or obliterated. This situation created major problems with property boundary decisions. The original markers, some made of wood posts, rocks or mounds of earth, were established in Missouri between 1815 and 1855, and many have been lost through time.
Since the mid-1970s, more than 8,000 new markers have been replaced or re-established by the county surveyors with funds provided by the various county commissions and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.
Today, new permanent monuments are placed that are made of aluminum pipes, iron rods, concrete markers or iron pipes with caps stamped to identify the corner. This ongoing effort will aid landowners, surveyors and cartographers by providing land boundary information that will facilitate the accurate determination of property ownership. This program is extremely valuable to all Missouri citizens.
Visitors to the program’s Web site are able to perform a number of searches from their home computers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on the vast holdings at the state’s Land Survey Repository. Searches on the Land Survey Index include legal descriptions (township, range and section), subdivision plats, U.S. survey number, General Land Office plats and field notes by township, surveyor name or number and city of St. Louis city blocks and roads.
Citizens are encouraged to check out the new service at www.dnr.mo.gov/molandsurveyindex/.